The present invention pertains to new and novel apparatus, and systems for use in conjunction with screen printing equipment in order to provide automated transfer from the printing equipment to obtain a drying of the work piece and transfer to a collecting station.
In screen printing various articles, e.g., towels and various other types of discrete forms, it was heretofore necessary to adhesively secure the towel or work piece to be printed onto a movable printing blanket for indexing the work piece from station to station during the printing operation. The need for adhesively securing the work piece to the surface of the printing blanket is to insure accurate registration of the work piece relative to the printing screen, by prohibiting any movement thereof which would otherwise upset the registration of the design being printed.
Heretofore, difficulty has been encountered in peeling off or removing the adhesively secured printed article from the printing blanket as the printing blanket rounded the end roller on which it is mounted. Generally the act of peeling off the printed article from the printing blanket was performed manually by an operator standing adjacent the discharge end of the machine. As such printing blanket is generally intermittently operated, the operator would manually peel off the endmost article at the discharge end of the machine during the stop interval of the blanket.
Depending on the indexing and/or size of the article being printed, it frequently required an operator to lean extremely forward, over the end of the machine, to peel the article from the blanket. Also, due to the operating speed of the machine, the time interval between successive prints may be too short to permit manual stripping of the article from the printing blanket. For these reasons considerable difficulty has been encountered in the art for effecting automatic removal of the printed work piece which has been adhesively secured to the printing blanket.